Korean Job Discussion Forums

[MetaFitX]

Edit: Title should read "Percentage of Westerners who speak 'decent' Korean"


This is a question to those who have traveled extensively throughout Asia. Preferably, people who have spent a significant amount of time in Korea and somewhere else.

Would you say that the proportion of Western foreigners who speak Korean is LESS or MORE than that of other countries? If so, where?

I have only traveled briefly to Japan a few times but my impression talking to a few foreigners was that there were more Westerners who spoke Japanese than foreigners who spoke Korean.

I'm curious if this holds true in other places like China or elsewhere??

[alongway]

China and Japan have higher profiles than Korea and other asian countries. At least until recently. Both have been big draws for a long time so there are tons of well established language classes in large and even smaller urban centers around the world as well as better learning materials in the form of books and things like that.

This is a highly subjective question with a lot of factors, so I'm not quite sure what your aim of the question is. Is it to prove that more people have an interest in one language, or that one language is inherently harder than another?

[MetaFitX]

[Hugo85]

Certainly less than Japan and perhaps China due to having been popular countries for quite some time. I remember being a kid and thinking I would want to learn Japanese yet was not even sure where Korea was on the map.

[s10czar]

I think we need to give ourselves a break. I've been here for a few years and I've made a reasonable effort to pick up the language. But it can only go so far because there's no positive feedback in the form of successful communication.

At risk of being flamed, I'm gonna go out on a limb and say the vast majority of Koreans simply CANNOT understand their language when it is spoken with a strange accent. I think it's a mental thing more than language thing.

I was out with a Korean friend the other day. We needed some more drinks so I rang the bell and the waitress appeared. So I said "Soju Chuseyo." She just looked at me like I was from Mars or something. Then she said (in Korean which I understood) "I can't speak English." So my friend said "Soju Chuseyo" and off she went to go get it.

Come on!!! Hey, I know my Hangul sucks. I know I must have a terrible accent. But I also know that my Hangul sounds NOTHING AT ALL like English. Yet I can't tell you how many times this has happened. I try to say something in Korean and they think I'm speaking English. Why? I don't really know but I'm guessing it's because I'm white and they just assume I must therefor be speaking English.

So how can we ever learn?

A Korean kid goes to school, learns to say something in English, tries it out on a foreigner and...THE FOREIGNER UNDERSTANDS. Wow!

The foreigner buys some audio tapes (or a book, or Rosetta Stone, or whatever), learns to say something in Hangul, tries it out on a Korean and...gets a blank stare.

So how can we ever learn? I mean come on...WE ARE IN A BAR and I say "Soju Chuseyo" and you honestly have no idea what I'm saying?

It's hopeless.

[T-J]

3...2...1...

[highstreet]

[Captain Corea]

I would say that my Korean is pretty poor- that being said, I often cringe at the pronunciation I hear from other foreigners.

I was with a bud the other day and he said "check out that Har-ba-gee" - WTF? Took me a second to make out that he wanted me to look at this old guy. And it was NOT because I didn't know 할아버지.

As to the actual question in the OP - no clue. I think one factor might be that there are a lot of people studying Japanese/Chinese before they head out overseas. No one I knew studied Korean before they got here.

[Brooks]

I spoke to a Korean woman last month and she said foreigners are getting better at Korean and more foreigners are staying longer in Korea.

In Japan, outside the Tokyo area at least foreign people seem to make more of an effort to learn Japanese. It is sort of expected.
I remember being in a bar with my wife years ago in Kyoto. The bartender wanted to know why my Japanese wasn`t so good at that time.
Oh, she said. You work in Tokyo.

[AbbeFaria]

I've been in Korea now off and on for going on 5 years. It was only in my last year here (before coming back last week after a year at home) that I put serious effort in to learning the language. I found a legit private tutor that was certified to teach Korean and met with her weekly and put in several hours a week on my own at coffee shops studying. At this point I can have simple conversations with sub-par grammar.

That being said, even at this level, I speak better Korean than almost any foreigner I've met. I don't say this to sound conceited, it's just the truth. Every time I meet someone new to Korea the first thing I tell them is to study, it will make their lives infinitely easier, and none of them do. They make some token efforts but stall out rather quickly and live with being able to order gimbap and booze and tell the cab how to get them to their favorite watering hole.

I can't say I've ever had much trouble being understood. Part of that is because when I study the language, I'm also studying the accent. While I've been told I sound 'cute' when I speak Korean, that I talk kind of like a teenage girl (side-effect of using all my Korean with my girlfriend and hanging out with Korean women) I'm often complimented on my accent. My tutor used to gush about it. On the taxi ride from Incheon to Gangnam last Saturday after my arrival I had a 20 minute conversation with the old cabbie and he understood every word and I could understand him.

I liken the inability of some Koreans to understand a foreigner using their own language to what happens when you take a drink of something that you thought was something else. Let's say you're at a bar and you reach for a glass that you think is your beer but is really water. You expect to drink the beer, expect to taste it, but it's the water instead and for a brief moment there is a horrible sense of confusion. Koreans simply don't expect foreigners to speak Korean so even though one might speak it decently they expect to hear English so when you talk, they assume it's English and they just didn't understand you.

I had a friend a few years back who was Korean but had been adopted by a British family when he was young. He was bilingual but when he spoke English he spoke it with an-educated British accent. Every time we would hang out, the first time he spoke, I had to do a little mental down-shift because I couldn't understand him. I expected to hear Korean-accented English, not British English. Once I cleared that hurdle, there was no difficulty.

But if you are trying to speak Korean, definitely do pay attention to how Koreans speak the language. That will help a lot. I would constantly grill my tutor to say things then mimic her until I got it right. And it's paid off. I still have a long way to go and am going to enroll in a Korean academy next month or in Feb. but my Korean has progressed enough that I'm able to date a girl who speaks little English. 90% of our conversations are in Korean.

(Apologies if this comment is a little disjointed, I had a late night last night. )

[AbbeFaria]

[jammo]

Pullgokki son

[roguefishfood]

[cheezsteakwit]

I've only been to Beijing once & Japan never so can't repond to the OP's question with authority

BUT

In my small town with maybe 50-60 foreigners, 10-15 of us study Korean at the local Univ. through the KIIP program , (Korea Social Integration Program).

Only ONE of us is 'fluent' in Korean and speaks it very well (he's been here 4 years though & ALSO speaks fluent Japanese.
He studied Japanese in college & lived there for awhile. Two other people from my Korean class also studied Japanese in college and lived there for a bit.
I don't know anyone who studied Korean in college, so maybe Japanese is a more popular language to learn at the college level (Chinese too ) ???

In regards to the above poster with the "soju chuseyo" story - maybe the waitress didn't WANT to understand you ??
I once tried to take a cab from the Incheon baseball stadium to the Incheon train station & I told the cabbie "Incheon Keecha Yoke".

I've been in country since March & I've said "__(Town name) __ Keecha Yoke" maybe 100-150 times with NO problems. For some reason, this cabbie couldn't understand me.
Whatever, I got the next cab & THAT cabbie made $9-10 driving to the Incheon train station, so I could get my luggage out of the locker & head over to the airport.

Maybe, some people have "selective understanding" ? or then again, maybe some foreigners just really butcher the Korean language ?? I know I do, quite often.

[staygold]